Rwanda

Book sales in the U.S. and Europe have been stagnant for years. While publishers design creative campaigns to turn Twitter followers into customers, they often ignore a much larger and more challenging prize: developing nations.

The story of the Norwegian customer who had here entire collection of books on her Kindle wiped carries on:

An Amazon Kindle user has had her account wiped and all her paid-for books deleted by Amazon without warning or explanation. She was informed by a customer relations executive that her account had been closed, all open orders had been cancelled and all her content had been removed, but has been unable to find out why.

Doctorow is quite right that what we’re talking about here is the territorial rights to a book.

 Years ago, David Risher, a former Amazon executive, came up with the unlikely plan of distributing Kindles to children in the developing world to help increase literacy.

Why take a fragile piece of technology that requires charging and Internet connections to places where infrastructure can be sparse, especially when there’s an inexpensive, low-tech alternative in print books?

But Mr. Risher has gradually found acceptance for the nonprofit he founded to take e-books to Africa, Worldreader.